Five Best Monday Columns

Juan Williams in The Hill on Condoleezza Rice for VeepHurling the former secretary of State into the veepstakes, The Hill columnist and Fox News contributor says Rice's addition to the ticket would be a political game changer. "Unlike some other prospects — her selection can never be dismissed as racial tokenism," Williams writes. "She is an experienced political player who has scars from previous battles; former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are still taking shots at her in their latest books. And her expertise on foreign policy, as a former secretary of state, would compensate for Romney’s lack of international experience."

Bill Keller in The New York Times on the future of North KoreaThe former New York Times executive editor asks what happens when the volatile Pyongyang regime goes under. "What about the Day After?" he writes. "If the regime’s days are numbered, the end is likely to be messier than anything we’ve seen in the Arab Spring. Why aren’t we sitting down with the Chinese, South Koreans, Japanese and Russians and making a plan to prevent nuclear material from being sold to the Russian mafia or the Chinese triads; to keep some panicky general from incinerating Seoul (minutes away as the artillery shell flies); to dissuade China or Russia from sending in troops to take advantage; to prevent Nuremberg-minded prison commandants from bulldozing the evidence into mass graves; to fend off an even more monumental human calamity than the famine of the mid-90s?"

Shikha Dalmia in Reason on why conservatives love big government In a sad revelation for the libertarian writer, Dalmia realizes that conservatives just aren't very libertarian these days. Dalmia cites a new column by Frank Luntz in The Washington Post saying that while conservatives "may have rallied around President Ronald Reagan’s call for smaller government three decades ago ... it’s not the 1980s anymore. Today, conservatives don’t want a reduced government so much as one that works better and wastes less," reads the piece. Dalmia can't quite figure out where libertarians lost the messaging war. "Maybe libertarians are just falling down on the job and can’t find a way to effectively communicate the failures of Big Government. Or Americans have just become too fond of their EITC and Social Security checks to be seriously moved."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times on youth unemploymentThe New York Times columnist spares a thought for the young and penniless. "In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible — but things could be worse."

George Will in The Washington Post on LBJ.The Washington Post columnist marvels at the skill of President Lyndon Johnson's biographer Robert Caro. "Are you seeking an antidote to current lamentations about the decline of political civility? Immerse yourself in Caro’s cringe-inducing catalogue of humiliations, gross and petty, inflicted on Johnson by many New Frontiersmen and, with obsessive hatred, by Robert Kennedy."